The Folklore Muse

Poetry, Fiction, and Other Reflections by Folklorists

Frank de Caro

Publication Year: 2008

Folklore—the inherently creative expression, transmission, and performance of cultural traditions—has always provided a deep well of material for writers, musicians, and artists of all sorts. Folklorists usually employ descriptive and analytical prose, but they, like scholars in other social sciences, have increasingly sought new, creative and reflexive modes of discourse. Many folklorists are also creative writers, some well known as such, and the folk traditions they research often provide shape and substance to their work. This collection of creative writing grounded in folklore and its study brings together some of the best examples of such writing.

Cover

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Th e editor would like to express his many thanks to the contributors to this volume.
Th is proposed book came to their attention mostly through a notice in the
American Folklore Society’s on-line newsletter, and the enthusiastic response to that
notice from the contributors was very encouraging. It ultimately resulted in this
rather novel...

The Folklorist’s Endeavor: An Introduction

Folklorists perform signal service to American culture, although seldom are they
celebrated for doing so. Finding, recording, and presenting traditions that might
otherwise remain known only to a subculture or a small region; making verbal art
less ephemeral in the historical and social record; trying to understand the vernacular
contexts...

Being or Becoming a Folklorist

Folklorists may have many individual accounts of how they wandered into their
uncommon profession: a college course, a chance accident, an early or late interest
in certain kinds of cultural experiences, a suddenly discovered love for certain
kinds of traditional expression. A few years ago, a collection...

Fieldwork, Folk Communities, Informants

Ethnography and intensive fieldwork live at the heart of what folklorists do. Going
“into the field”—observing traditions, listening to people, recording their songs
and stories and riddles and personal accounts and descriptions—is what provides
the cultural understandings that folklorists use in their work. Folklorists come to
know communities...

Performance

Historically, when folklorists recorded an “informant” singing a song, recounting
a story, or even speaking a proverb or telling a riddle, they rendered it as a “text”:
a block of words that could be written and printed. Sometimes the singer or teller
or speaker was largely forgotten; sometimes ...

The Powers of Narrative

Although folklore is hardly the only field intensely interested in narrative, folklorists
do concern themselves with particularly fundamental forms of storytelling: the
oral, the traditional, the stories that have persisted over time and space for long,
long periods of time. They are particularly well situated to observe the power that
narrative has to shape social meanings and convey cultural agendas, to see how
very important...

Legend and Myth

Legends and myths, especially those well known from classical literature or art,
have had fantastically wide appeal to writers, including modern writers. One need
only think of Joyce’s Ulysses or Auden’s “Th \e Shield of Achilles” or even ...

Material Traditions, Material Things

Although folklorists long gave their attention mostly to verbal traditions, they
have also been involved in the examination of material culture. They look at
folk art and folk artifacts and at the processes of making and using folk objects,
at the whole of folklife. Folk architecture has been of great interest, but so too
have quilt making...

Children’s Lore and Language

Although children obviously belong to larger cultural groups, folklorists have long
recognized that kids are also their own folk group with their own lore. William
Wells Newell saw that in the 19th century...

Ritual and Custom

Defining the term “ritual” can be problematic for folklorists and other scholars,
especially as more secular behavior comes to be included under a rubric once
reserved more for the religious. And the terms “custom” or even “folk custom”
can be catchalls...

Worldview and Belief

As conceived by anthropologists and folklorists, worldview is certainly a very
broad concept: the characteristic way in which a society envisions the nature of
the universe and how people and things and forces operate within it. It is made
up of many...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.